


PhDarcy

by kennagirl



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, WandaVision (TV)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Darcy Lewis-centric, For the most part, Gen, Missing Scene, No Dialogue, several years of them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 09:14:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29276025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kennagirl/pseuds/kennagirl
Summary: She is a doctor. She is an expert in astrophysics. Most people assume those things are connected.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 175





	PhDarcy

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be like 800 words about Darcy’s transition from poli-sci undergrad to Dr. Lewis, astrophysics expert. I had more feelings about where she’s been than I thought I did.

When Darcy sat down with her high school guidance counselor over a decade ago, she never imagined this path for herself. When asked what she wanted to study, she had shrugged and said it was hard to decide when she didn’t even know what was out there. They narrowed it down gradually, and eventually Darcy mentioned that she enjoyed sitting in on the city hall meetings her mom regularly attended as a concerned citizen. The people there called her a nuisance, she was lobbying for things like non-rusty playgrounds and better library resources. Darcy loved watching her mom work the politicians into a corner, so the counselor suggested political science. It felt like as good a plan as any, so Darcy researched schools with good political science programs and said yes to Culver. 

She took her time joining the department, wanting to try anything and everything she could get her hands on. It meant she stayed undeclared longer than planned, but she was on track to graduate only one semester late. Then, she found The Problem. Somehow, her science credits slipped through the cracks. Though she tried to argue with several people, up to and including the dean of the college, political science did not count as a science for the purposes of general education requirements. It would have to be in the spring semester, meaning she was graduating a year late, but she only needed six credits and she would have her degree. 

Having already set her apartment lease to end with the fall semester, Darcy searched for alternative arrangements. A tip from a friend she had made in the theatre class she took for her arts credit led her to the internships. She asked around in the various science departments about internship opportunities, preferably ones for non-majors. One kind soul pointed her in the direction of an astrophysicist who couldn’t get the help she was looking for due to her reputation in the department. The ad called for a science major, but apparently no one else had applied and it seemed to be mostly data entry and equipment hauling, so Darcy’s chances were good. 

Five months later, Darcy is tasing a god in the New Mexican desert and her life plan changed without her even realizing it. 

She graduated, but didn’t follow through on her plans to apply to different government positions. Instead, she stayed with Jane, trying to bring Thor back. She followed her to Norway, then New York, then London, managing Jane’s life and keeping her in funding from various grants and government agencies. She wasn’t really paid, but she finagled enough money to give both her and Jane a roof over their heads and a box of Pop-Tarts in the cabinet. Aliens kept invading, Thor appeared and disappeared according to the whims of the cosmos, and Darcy put her political science skills to use navigating the surprisingly cutthroat academic world. When a grant opportunity came up that promised substantial funding should the lab in question have a graduate student assistant, Darcy started looking up masters programs. At this point, she had learned a lot about astrophysics, but knowing a lot was not the necessary requirement, so she applied to grad programs that lined up with her bachelor’s degree. If these grant applications were going to be vague about their requirements, she was going to take advantage. 

Her MA was finished in three semesters instead of four, which was surprising considering she was still working with Jane full time. Darcy turned around and applied directly to PhD program at the same school, because it never hurt to have a back-up plan in case Jane accidentally blew herself up at some point. The degree may have been in international relations, but she was likely to put it to use navigating the secret government agencies they were spending most of their time hanging around. 

The end of Darcy’s third year as a PhD student marked a lot of changes. Her classwork was done, she had aced her comprehensive exams, her prospectus had been approved, and she was officially ABD. She was working in the lab with Jane, munching on candy and verifying some results that seemed a little wonky, when she heard something clatter to the floor. Darcy glanced up just in time to see Jane dissolve into dust, drifting harmlessly to the floor. 

Like any sane person, she panicked. She called Thor first, because this had mystical Avengers bullshit written all over it and he was most likely to answer her call. When he didn’t answer, she moved on to Barton, who had handed over his number back in New Mexico. Another voicemail, and she moved on to a string of agents of various agencies, FBI and NASA and the remains of SHIELD, and then she pulled out the big guns and called Pepper Potts because she may not know what’s going on, but she could find out and add Darcy to the list of people who needed answers. One more call to Erik, just to let him know what happened, and she set down the phone. Two hours later, Darcy still hadn’t moved from her spot at the desk, afraid to touch anything. The phone rang, Pepper on the other end, telling her that the Avengers had _lost_ against their latest enemy, and the big bad had snapped his fingers and fucking vanished half of all life on earth. Yes, she had heard this from Captain America himself. No, she didn’t know why she didn’t hear it from Tony. 

No, there was no plan to get them back. 

They weren’t sure it was possible. 

Darcy hung up the phone, numb. She grabbed a clean beaker and swept up the remains of Jane on the tile floor. They might still figure this out, and she wasn’t going to let Jane come back to life in a dumpster or something because the cleaning staff threw her away. She secured a lid for the beaker, grabbed her stuff, and turned off the lights as she shut the lab door. Science could wait, she had to figure out what to do next. 

What she didn’t realize, not until days later, was that in that cluttered lab, in a single moment, with her hair in a messy bun and a Twizzler hanging out of her mouth, Darcy became the leading expert on the planet on a particular subset of astrophysics. 

In the days that followed the Snap, she received a few calls returning her voicemails. Thor was distraught, having lost nearly everything before the Snap had even happened. Adding two of his first three Midgardian friends to the list was too much and he started crying on the call. Barton showed his devastation in silence. He was alive, his family wasn’t, he was going hunting. Those were the only three sentences she got out of him. Darcy asked him to be careful and to contact her if he got into something she could help with. She never figured out what prompted him to call her back or what prompted her to offer. It’s not like they had even talked since New Mexico, other than texting each other occasional photos of Thor looking dumb. But everyone was rubbed raw and looking for some kind of comfort and connection in a world that was suddenly half empty, so maybe that was it. 

Pepper called her again, once Tony came back. Apparently he had almost been stranded in deep space with a blue cyborg woman. He knew Jane had continued her work with the Bridge and that usually it just went from Earth to Asgard, but was there a way to make one that moved through space instead of between realms? He didn’t really want to get stuck like that again. Tony got himself involved in the conversation, asking if she wanted to move her lab to the Avengers facility upstate or if he should designate some Stark spaces for her, New York or California, her choice. Darcy tried to explain again that Jane was gone, there was no one to work on this, she wasn’t an astrophysicist. He asked her some pointed questions, made her realize what all she knew, and told her that whether she liked it or not, she was an astrophysicist. 

She tried to deny it, but it was the truth. She stopped being just the intern a long time ago, and had started acting as Jane’s second. She knew things, understood the data, could even make suggestions about what avenues of experimentation to take next. No one else left after the Snap had been living and breathing Einstein-Rosen data for the past seven years. She and Jane’s piles of notes (and Erik’s, which she went and collected from his apartment because he had vanished too) were the ultimate authority on reaching other realms, as well as all the theoretical nonsense that came with them, which included controlled travel between distant points in the same realm. 

She agreed to a set up in the Avengers facility. Less light pollution than wherever the Stark places were, plus it would let her keep an ear out for any new nightmare scenarios. Her only stipulation for Tony’s strong-arming was that she would only work in the lab part time until she finished her dissertation. Once she had her degree, she would devote all her time to interspace travel, but she wasn’t going to stop her degree now. 

Two years later, Darcy had almost accepted that she was never going to see the vanished people again. Not Jane, not Erik, not her mom who had vanished from her office that terrible day. When she had her hooding ceremony, she didn’t see any of the people she wanted to see, just Natasha smiling sadly as she clapped. Natasha, Darcy, and Steve were the only ones who still lived in the facility full time, while Rhodey and Bruce would come stay for a week or so at a time, and Tony used to visit, but much less after Morgan was born. It was a lonely life, but Darcy threw herself into it. She may still be renting the lab space Jane had disappeared from, but she knew she couldn’t dwell on the past and what ifs. Even if everyone came back that moment, things would be different. She was Dr. Darcy Lewis, and it was time to truly become the astrophysicist she wasn’t supposed to be. 

The next three years were spent running tests, collecting data, tweaking variables, and repeating the process. The problem was that the cosmic energy of the universe was radically different than it was when she first started working with Jane. She had mentioned some problematic readings to Steve, saying that they were missing the normal trace amounts of energy that had been overwhelmingly present when the Convergence had opened portals all over Greenwich. He had informed her that the Infinity Stones, which generated that energy and enabled the Snap, had been destroyed. It definitely made her life harder, but she wasn’t going to give up. She would keep running tests, collecting data, and tweaking variables until she either figured it out or blew herself up. 

Or, apparently, until the Avengers decided to invent fucking _time travel_ to fix everything. 

She had been there when Scott showed up, and they tried to recruit her for their plan, but Darcy put her foot down. She dealt solely with the “space” part of the fabric of space-time, studying stars and cosmic energy, not quantum physics. She thought it would take a while, with just the one expert working on it, but then Bruce showed up. Not long after that, Tony appeared, and Darcy got the feeling that this might actually happen. 

She waited until all the original Avengers had arrived. She gave Thor a hug and Barton a punch on the arm (hunting and mass murder are not the same!), then packed her bags. Once the team had a successful test run under their belts, she wished them luck with a jaunty salute and headed out. She knew it would only be a matter of days, so she decided to camp out in the old lab, bringing the beaker of Jane back to where she started, just in case. 

The beaker turned out to be pointless, as Jane just re-formed where she had been standing five years ago. Darcy tackled her to the ground, crying. After catching her breath and thoroughly scaring Jane, she pulled out her phone, desperate to hear her Mom’s voice. She passed a spare phone to Jane, telling her to call Erik so she only had to explain what happened once. Luckily, her mom accepted “Avengers bullshit” as a sufficient explanation and demanded that Darcy visit her as soon as possible before hanging up. Jane and Erik had far more questions, and Darcy did what she could to answer them. When Darcy mentioned having five years of weird readings and tests to go over, Erik made noises about booking a flight and hung up. 

Jane and Darcy went back to the hotel room Darcy had rented but barely used the past three days. They got caught up on personal things, and Jane cried when Darcy showed her the photos from her graduation. Eventually, they switched on the TV to see how the world was reacting. Unsurprisingly, it was chaos. People appeared right where they had disappeared, though luckily whoever brought them back remembered to put everyone somewhere safe, so no one fell from the sky out of a plane that was no longer there. There were issues in hospitals, as people reappeared in beds without necessary equipment, but the fatalities on that front were comparatively low. Everything was about the return, except one news story, based out of upstate New York, reporting on a large cloud of smoke, flashing lights, and terrible noises. Most people weren’t aware of the location of the Avengers facility, but the residents had put the pieces together years before, so the local reporter correctly claimed an Avengers battle while leaving out the specifics of why that location. Darcy watched, transfixed for a moment, then shut off the TV when the story changed again. She couldn’t afford to freak out. Either they would call her when it was safe, or they would lose and it wouldn’t be safe again. Having a panic attack would not change the result. 

Steve called her the next day to let her know it was over. The facility was gone, Tony was gone, Natasha was gone, but it was over. Darcy thanked him blankly, then hung up to cry. 

Since all Darcy had was the car, her laptop, some equipment, and a duffle bag full of clothes, they decided to stop by a Wal-Mart for supplies before road tripping to Darcy’s childhood home. They had been there a week when Pepper called. They were holding private funerals for Tony and Natasha, and she also wanted to discuss Darcy’s employment as the resident Stark astrophysicist, especially since her lab had been thoroughly destroyed by the battle. Darcy tried to put her foot down on that, saying that the specifics could wait until the dead had been mourned, but Pepper confessed that she was trying to stay busy. Her main focus was Morgan, but she was also sorting out some of the legal protections and situations left behind by the dissolution of the Avengers. It mostly involved pairing each hero with a lawyer they could work with for the inevitable lawsuits and charges, but since Darcy was not an enemy of the state, she just needed compensation for losing nearly everything she owned. Darcy asked if she and Jane could just continue working in old space she’d kept, with an eye towards getting a larger space later after she’d found somewhere that could house Jane’s equipment and the equipment Darcy was going to have to rebuild for her own work. Pepper agreed, though she also said she would be placing a large deposit in Darcy’s account so she could buy some clothes and find somewhere to live in the meantime. 

After the funerals, and after Steve decided to pull some more time travel nonsense that she wasn’t even going to think about until she was ready to yell at him coherently about the fabric of space-time, Darcy settled into the lab she’d abandoned five years before. Jane was puttering around, removing hastily draped dust tarps and warming up the equipment. They spent a few days getting back into the swing of things. Darcy had been running a lab by herself for five years. Others had sometimes stopped by, but she wasn’t used to having someone in her space like that anymore. She couldn’t wait until it felt normal again. 

They’d barely gotten started going through the data Darcy had collected while Jane was gone when the agent showed up. He said he was with SWORD and they needed an expert in astrophysics. It took a call to Barton to verify that SWORD was a real thing, then a quick check through the JOCASTA system Tony had installed on all Avenger and Avenger-adjacent phones to verify that the guy was a SWORD agent. Convinced that they probably weren’t being kidnapped for nefarious purposes, Darcy turned to Jane, expecting to have to talk her into it. Instead, Jane said Darcy was the girl for the job. She was five years behind current research, it would take time to get back up to speed, but Darcy was the leading expert in astrophysics, especially astrophysics combined with weird stuff. 

The agent clearly didn’t care who he took, just saying that he would wait in the car downstairs to take whoever back to their apartment to pack a bag. Darcy was still stunned, but Jane just hugged her and told her to kick some ass and not take any disrespect. She was an expert, not a government lackey. And if they tried to agent-ize her, let them know that SHIELD still has first dibs and they’d probably send someone after her. Darcy laughed, still unsure about the situation but more confident in her abilities. Whatever she was being recruited for, it couldn’t be weirder than some of the stuff she’d seen. 

Darcy grabbed some of the portable equipment and carried it down to the car that was still waiting. She’d gotten into the habit of taking it with her everywhere, which meant it had been in the trunk of the car when she had come to get Jane. It had been adjusted and upgraded so many times over the past five years, she wasn’t sure Jane would be able to use it as intended. A quick stop by the short term apartment she was renting with Jane allowed her to shove her entire, limited wardrobe into a backpack, and then she joined the clown car. 

She was there thirty seconds when some jackbooted thug called her Ms. Lewis across a crowd, like she should follow him wherever he’s headed with no explanation. Jane’s words about respect echoed in the back of her head and she retorted. 

“Doctor Lewis.” 

She would not let them treat her like she was treated back in the desert of New Mexico. She was an expert, one they needed, and regardless of the field, her title was Doctor.

**Author's Note:**

> I am a PhD student holding down a job in a field radically different from what I study, and people I meet at that job are generally surprised and somewhat judgmental about the disconnect. This piece is catharsis.


End file.
